


A Market for Lemons

by lyrithim



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: F/M, Get Together, Introspective Chowder, M/M, Mutual Pining, POV Chowder, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-01
Updated: 2017-08-01
Packaged: 2018-12-09 07:13:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11664207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyrithim/pseuds/lyrithim
Summary: Chris Chow knew all along.





	A Market for Lemons

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally written for Nurseydex Week 2017’s “Get Together/Mutual Pining” but it sort of grew ten times in length and I missed the entire week altogether. All that really says though is that I really (!!) enjoyed writing from Chowder’s POV and I hope you’ll enjoy this story too. <333

At eighteen, before he entered Samwell, Chris Chow’s biggest regret in life was breaking his best friends’ hearts.

He had met both of them at nine years old, in the San Francisco elementary school with wide brick walls piling several stories high that his parents had enrolled him in after finishing graduate school in Massachusetts. Within the school’s gray classrooms he found Meimei and David—Meimei the shy but stern overachiever, David the loudmouthed pigtail-puller. The teacher grouped them together on the first day of school for a math poster project that involved finger-painted ladybugs. The three of them took a look at each other, and the rest was history.

He didn’t remember when, exactly, he knew his two best friends had a thing for each other—maybe since the day they met. What he did know was that cries of cooties in elementary school carried into David awkwardly asking Meimei for a dance at the end of sixth grade—to Meimei trying to match her makeup to the K-pop stars that David loved so much at the end of middle school—to the stretch of strained silence after David caught her making out with that Lucas boy the summer before sophomore year—to Meimei’s pale, pursed lips after David brought an underclassman to their junior prom.

Chris was swung from side to side throughout all of this, playing the shoulder Meimei cried on during study sessions, the consoler in David’s rants after hockey games. By his junior year he had begun trying to convince both of them of the other’s feelings, but progress was always derailed by the usual girlfriend/boyfriend drama of the trimester. It wasn’t until the week leading up to senior prom that Chris finally convinced David—that David finally let himself be convinced.

“If you’re wrong, I’m never speaking to you again,” David warned.

“I’m not,” Chris said, giddy that his friends were finally going to be together, after all this time. “Trust me. I’m not wrong on this.”

Then came prom. Chris wasn’t sure to this day what exactly had happened, other than David had approached Meimei in the hotel lobby of the venue, and Meimei—said no. When he questioned Meimei afterwards, she told him, “We’re going to different colleges anyway. It was never going to work out,” while David’s version of the events was “She said she loved me like a brother.”

David did not, as he promised, cease contact with Chris, but he stopped talking to Meimei, and Meimei to him. After an excruciating summer, Meimei headed to Berkeley, and David stayed in the city for SFSU. Chris left them both, for Samwell.

 

 

Chris met Dex and Nursey again in Samwell, months after the prospective students tour. They were the last people he expected to catch him in the same Meimei-David triangle again.

And they hadn’t, at first. When Chris went to Bitty for help first semester, he held nothing but honest concern. Nursey and Dex fought like cats and dogs and were so mean to each other sometimes, Chris didn’t know what to do.

He did remember when he first suspected Dex. A couple practices after Bitty told Chris there was nothing to be done about Samwell’s second pair of defensemen, Chris caught Dex’s eyes skate over Nursey’s bare shoulders in the locker room. When Dex realized Chris was watching, he turned away. The tip of his ears burned red. And Chris thought, _Huh_.

Any additional thoughts Chris might have had over the event were dispelled a couple of days later when he ran into the most beautiful girl in Samwell.

 

 

At the start of spring semester, the freshmen of Samwell Men’s Hockey team were ordered to conduct a coordinated attack on the LAX bro house. Chris, Nursey, and Dex were assigned the actual break-in, while their luckier teammates did surveillance. When Dex asked if this was hazing, he was met with cryptic smiles and Lardo’s flat “This is the least of it, son.”

In the middle of a chilly winter afternoon, the three of them hid by an untrimmed bush in the LAX house backyard, among crushed beer cans and slimy-looking brown bags, until one member of the recon team texted to confirm the last LAX bro had exited the yard. They slid the kitchen window open slowly and dove in, _Mission Impossible_ -style. Nursey located the mission object in the living room: the First Puck, a tough, scratched hockey puck said to have won the SMH’s first NCAA championship some thirty years back, but in the present decade was best suited to for breaking open clam shells or dashing open windshields. It sat in a cleared-out circle of empty vodka handles and red solo cups, atop an old cassette player like a crown upon its dais.

“All this effort for some old puck,” Dex said, as Nursey walked into the room. “I bet Shitty made all of it up.”

“Don’t be so cynical, Poindexter,” Nursey said, as he squatted down to inspect the thing. “Traditions like this are what makes a team a team.”

“I think it’s pretty cool,” Chris ventured.

“See? C thinks it’s chill,” Nursey said, tilting his head another way quizzically.

Dex grinned. “Chowder, you’re too impressed by everything Samwell-related.”

“That’s true too,” Nursey said, chuckling.

“Well, a lot of things about Samwell _are_ cool!” Chris protested.

Dex laughed and looked ready to say more as Nursey reached for the puck. Then several things happened at once:

  * Chris’s phone pinged with a text: _lol oops sorry a lax bro is back are you guys still in there?_
  * The front door opened.
  * Nursey plucked the puck off the table, and all around them, sirens wailed.



The LAX bro at the foyer, who had been texting on his phone, looked up.

“Shit,” Nursey said when they made eye contact. “C, get the window _._ ”

Chris did, hopping onto the counter and wrenching the latch open. He turned back just in time to see the LAX bro charge for Nursey and Dex—and see Nursey trip and fall.

Dex, who had been reaching for Chris’s hand, looked back as well. As the LAX bro went for Nursey—whose eyes were wide, like he couldn’t believe what his life was coming to—Dex doubled back and tackled the guy into the cupboard door.

“Get up and _run_ ,” Dex gritted out.

Nursey did, tucking the First Puck in his jacket and taking Chris’s hand. Chris helped him and himself out the house, and Dex followed soon after, ducking through the narrow opening, wearing the same expression of comical disbelief Nursey had worn. Chris slammed the window shut just as the LAX bro scrambled to his feet inside the kitchen. The three of them then booked it across the street.

Back at the Haus, Shitty examined the puck, spat and shined it, and declared its authenticity. The announcement was met with great applause, and the frogs shared a beer that night with the rest of the team in celebration. Chris texted the whole story to Cait soon after, to her great amusement and wonder.

Chris didn’t see Dex and Nursey talk to each other that night, but something had changed between them. The next day, when Jack led the team to the Pond for an impromptu shinny, Chris saw Nursey ruffle Dex’s hair as they went on ice, and Dex laughing and starting a snowball fight. Lardo came to speak to him at one point and followed his gaze to Nursey and Dex.

“I was worried about them,” she said, “but it seems that they’re going to be alright, huh?”

“Yeah,” said Chris. “Yeah, I think so.”

 

 

Chris was certain about Nursey sooner than he was about Dex. Nursey was good at hiding things from strangers, which was how he was able to build a reputation around his chillness, but he was horrible at it among friends. Chris thought Nursey couldn’t help it, being the person he was—full of emotions that he tried to contain in his poetry, full of passion that he tried to temper into acceptability. He didn’t want to hide himself, but he must have learned to. Seeing him do so made Chris inexpressibly sad.

But around Dex, Nursey was effervescent despite himself. By February their arguments had lost their mean edge, and when Nursey teased Dex it held a bright-eyed challenge that Dex would always be eager to meet, and Nursey knew it. The coaches were right to pair them up; they were best on ice when they were with each other, because Nursey pushed Dex and Dex pushed back. With them, Chris was able to achieve his first shutout the day before Valentine’s and give Samwell another well-deserved victory.

Nursey was a smart guy, with a head full of philosophy and literature and insights that Chris could never digest in a lifetime. The people Nursey went out with or brought back to his dorm after kegsters were all people who were brilliant in the same cutting way—people who were kind and open but also able to stand their ground when put to the test. Despite all of Dex’s qualities, Chris hadn’t thought them to be that similar to Dex at first, because there were some parts of Dex that were quiet in a way Nursey wasn’t. But then Chris saw how Dex stripped out that quietness to rise to Nursey’s words. It wasn’t the same way Chris and Cait were—the way they could hold each other’s hand, sit without speaking, and stay that way forever—but he understood that kind of love too.

 

 

With Dex, it took longer.

Chris wondered why sometimes, afterwards, because it generally took him very little time to know his friends, and Dex was not a good liar under the best of circumstances. Was it because Dex always presented himself as straight? If Chris were honest with himself, that wasn’t it. Chris grew up in San Francisco, and he knew it wasn’t good to make a habit of assuming preferences either way—it wasn’t polite. But Dex would flush and sputter and let his eyes stray around Nursey, and Chris should have known from that alone.

Was it, then, that Chris was afraid the same thing that happened to Meimei and David would happen to his friends? To him, this was more likely—this sort of selfish fear. And maybe it was one of the reasons. But it wasn’t all.

The moment Chris knew for sure that Dex had romantic feelings for Nursey was the end of the school year, while they were helping Nursey move his things into his dad’s car. When all the boxes were taped and ready at the backseat, they shared hugs and reaffirmed promises to meet up over the summer. Then Dex and Chris watched the BMW roll over the surrounding hilltops then blend into the horizon. Dex’s eyes lingered for too long, and when he realized it his gaze flickered to Chris then down to the ground. He reached down to pick up some of the flattened cardboard boxes, muttering about heading to Chris’s dorm, and turning to hide his face—though not the flush down his neck.

In the end, Chris thought the real reason he hadn’t seen it sooner was because Dex hadn’t. Dex didn’t want to believe he had feelings for Nursey that went beyond the platonic. Chris wondered if that moment—that sweet-sour moment of parting with Nursey for a few months after the easy routine of classes, practice, and games—he wondered if that was the moment Dex first started to believe.

 

 

Summertime in San Francisco was weird for Chris the same way all first summers back home were following a year in college. As the days stretched longer and the sky fitted across a clear and blue shoreline, Chris visited old classmates and teachers, helped out at home, babysat his cousins, volunteered, and missed Samwell.

He was happy to see Meimei and David again though, and as frequently as they liked too with Meimei’s internship and classes and David’s part-time job. But he met up with them only separately, and he didn’t dare to ask whether they ever tried to talk to each other again. It didn’t seem like they did, anyway. They all had separate lives now. Meimei had joined a sorority the semester before, and she gushed about it while rolling her eyes for the more ridiculous bits—always in fondness. She and Chris constantly compared their experiences at their respective houses with each other’s and found, ominously, more similarities than they both expected. On the other hand, David had been in a brief but serious relationship with a sophomore at a nearby community college. He and the girl had an amicable breakup a few weeks prior when the girl transferred to a state college near San Diego, and they still texted each other, as David showed Chris.

Chris went down to the town of San Luis Obispo in July to meet up with Cait and spend a few nights at her family’s house. Her parents were welcoming, and he seemed to have made an even better impression on them when he made Cait’s baby brother giggle with a few well-executed rounds of peek-a-boo. Cait showed him around town, took him hiking, and introduced him to her high school friends. On his last day there, they attended one of the friends’ birthday party and left early to stargaze by the nearby hills, but still returned home at a respectable enough time to put up an appearance of propriety. Chris then drove Cait up to San Francisco, where they would stay for a few more days before flying east to meet up with Nursey and Dex.

On the road, as he waited for the cashier of a dust-trapped gas station to tally up his total, Chris received a text from David:

**David Pan** _  
yoo got off work early today lets hang_

**David Pan** _  
wanna meet the gf that you’re all moony eyed abt_

Chris bit his lower lip and tapped out a reply:

**Me** _  
definitely!!! cait’s wonderful you’ll love her_

**Me** _  
but also i need to tell you_

**Me**  
_meimei will be there_

He didn’t get a reply until he returned to the car.

**David Pan _  
_** _yeah thats cool. Where/when do we meet you?_

“What’s up?” Cait asked when Chris settled himself back into the passenger’s seat.

“Nothing, just—” Chris hesitated. “Another friend will be meeting us in SF.”

“Cool,” Cait said easily, as the engine comes to life in a jangle of keys. “Who are they?”

“His name’s David. He’s a really good friend from high school.”

He wasn’t facing Cait, but he could feel her eyes on him.

“He knows Meimei?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “They were good friends too.”

When they arrived at Chris’s parents’ house in the city, Meimei and David were sitting by the front porch—David splay-legged along the steps, Meimei perched carefully atop the railings. There was a weary distance between them, but when they recognized Chris’s car they both lifted their hands to wave. It was so much a scene from high school that Chris’s heart hurt looking at them.

Cait, as it turned out, got along splendidly with both of them. David had a friend from work who went to the college in San Luis Obispo, Meimei had met a few people from the area through her sorority, and by the magic of the Californian public education system they discovered three mutual friends among them within fifteen minutes. For the rest of the day, they went along with Cait to do a round of touristing: ride trolleys, cycle down the Golden Gate Bridge, splash along the beach by dusk. Throughout it all Cait was breathless with wonder, and seeing his hometown through her eyes, Chris was in love with the city all over again.

The only dim spot in the day was Meimei and David’s restrained, polite conversation with each other. Before, they would split the heavens with their ongoing, undefeated challenge of wits, but they were so careful with each other now.

Chris didn’t meet up with the two of them again that summer. The Monday after, three weeks before the start of the fall semester, he and Cait took an early-morning plane to Boston, where they would unpack at Samwell then drive down to New York City. Dex had already been staying at Nursey’s for a couple of days, and by the sound of their texts, Chris and Cait’s presences were sorely needed in Manhattan.

 

 

A few days into their sophomore year, Dex began going out with Susan from debate society. He didn’t volunteer details about their relationship much, and Chris felt slightly uncomfortable for the girl’s sake, but Nursey was keen to bring her up frequently—asking about how things were going, making jibes at Dex’s sexual prowess that even Chris knew were very off from usual bro talk. Dex responded awkwardly, without his usual fire. Nursey, sensing that something was wrong, took it as the cue to ask even more questions, to show how _obviously_ okay he was with this development.

It reminded Chris of their fights the year before. Worse, Nursey and Dex’s on-ice performance slipped at a time when the Samwell Men’s Hockey team badly needed to maintain defense in light of losing their best scorer to professional hockey. Coach Hall sent the two of them dismayed looks by the end of the third week of practice, and Chris knew he had to intervene.

He couldn’t ask Bitty again, because Bitty clearly had a lot on his mind—Chris thought there was a boy Bitty might have met off-campus over the summer, and things weren’t working out. So Chris sought to talk to Nursey himself. Unfortunately, the first thing that slipped out of his mouth when he invited Nursey over to his room was “So it’s okay, really, that you might be a little jealous of Dex’s girlfriend, but I just want to say that—”

“What?”

Nursey’s eyes were filled with such unusual panic that Chris paused, reconsidered his words, and said, “Oh. Shoot.” This was giving him too much déjà vu from high school. “I’m so sorry, I mean—”

“No, C, it’s chill,” Nursey said. “It’s— How did you know?”

“I—I sort of guessed.”

“Oh.” Nursey swallowed and smiled, a little weakly. “Does he know?”

Chris shook his head.

Nursey sighed. “Good.” He leaned forward and mussed up his hair. Then, after taking a deep breath, he straightened and laughed. “ _Fu-u-uck_. God, I thought I was hiding it so well, you know? But I guess not well enough.”

“Nursey,” Chris said sadly. “It’s alright. I mean, Dex is great. Of course it’s natural to have a crush on him.”

Nursey looked past him out the window, let go a deep breath, and said, “Yeah.” He faced Chris again. “Yeah. You’re right. It’s just a crush. That’s all. Crushes come—and go. What did you want to talk about earlier?”

“I wanted—” Chris rubbed at his eyes. He really kept saying the wrong things today. Derek Malik Nurse, of course, wasn’t the type of person to do _crushes_. And if Chris was right about the when, this crush would have lasted almost a year now. “You really like Dex, don’t you?”

Nursey was silent for an even longer moment. Then he said, “Yeah.”

Chris reached for his stuffed Shark and hugged it to his chest. He smiled. “What do you like about him?”

Nursey grinned at him. “You’re trying to get me to talk sappy about our best friend?”

“You listen to me talk about Cait all the time,” Chris pointed out. “You’re friends with her too.”

Nursey tilted his head. “True.”

“Is it his ears?” Chris asked. “You bring them up a lot.”

“No I don’t.”

“You do,” Chris reassured. “You really do.”

Nursey laughed. “It’s not his ears—well. I mean.” His chuckles softened into a smile. “All that blustering and shit, I’m not going to lie, it’s kind of cute too, but it’s like, he’s there for me when I’m having a bad day or something like that, you know? Like I’d go silent and he’d—he’d know just what to say to get me laughing. It’s—look, he’s just really—reliable, right? Like I know I can trust him to catch me when I fall...

“It’s dumb,” Nursey said suddenly. “You know what I always thought was the biggest lie that poets tell?” He looked at Chris.

“No,” Chris admitted.

“Unrequited love,” Nursey said. “It’s not real love when someone doesn’t love you back: that’s the biggest lie that poets tell. Doesn’t matter if they’re dead seventeenth-century white men or guys front-and-center in 1920s Harlem. It can’t be love if someone doesn’t love you back.”

Things did go back to normal, a bit, between Dex and Nursey afterwards. Dex was no more comfortable around the subject of Susan from debate, but Nursey joked around more naturally and their D-men chemistry was back. At the same time, there was such a sadness around Nursey now, such resignation, that Chris had to look away.

Two weeks into November, Dex broke up quietly with Susan, and he told Chris and Nursey about it the day after. It was a mutual decision, Dex explained. Both of them felt the relationship was going nowhere. Throughout the conversation Chris was carefully watching Nursey—and Dex was too. There was a messy churn of emotions in Nursey’s features, each widening of the eyes and upward tick of his brows conveying multitudes. But Nursey, understanding that he was being watched, but perhaps not really understanding way, held every other expression into himself, and when Dex was done Nursey played out a round of careful consolations—on rhythm, on beat. Dex’s eyes flickered away, flickered back, and he smiled and said his thanks. And that was that.

 

 

Dex came to the Haus at the start of spring semester with his eyes red, his hair a mess, and tear streaks still visible along his cheeks.

“I think I like Nursey,” he said, when Chris opened the door. “A lot.”

And Chris thought, _Oh. It’s starting._ But he pushed that thought aside and tugged Dex into a hug. Dex planted his face onto Chris’s shoulder and began to cry.

When Dex was coherent again, he sat by Chris’s desk and quickly ran through his own story, as though to dismiss it: he had known he liked guys since he was young, but he had known too he was going to marry a nice girl someday and have a family together; he tried to embrace bisexuality silently when it was presented to him in high school, but in Samwell he realized his preferences were exclusively for men.

“At first, with Nursey, I thought—” He swallowed. At the mention of Nursey, he seemed to find himself unable to continue. “It’s dumb, really. Before, I could stop myself from thinking about it, but now I see Jack and Bitty so happy together and I think, _Maybe that can be me too. Maybe that can be me and_ —” He stopped again. “Anyway. With Susan—that was the last time I tried to convince myself. Shouldn’t have done it though, wasted her time when she could’ve been with someone else. Shouldn’t have led her on like that.”

“It worked out, though, didn’t it?” Chris pointed out. “She’s with someone from the lacrosse team now.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess so.”

Dex said nothing else but sat leaning forward with his hands gripping his knees, as though waiting to be struck. Chris went over and hugged him again. Dex hiccupped up a laugh.

“How’re you and Cait?” Dex asked, making room for him in Chris’s tiny chair.

“Great, actually. Though—” Chris slung his arm around Dex. “Her team is heading into the championships next week, and she’s their third-best scorer, so she got a little stressed yesterday, you know?”

“Yeah,” Dex said. “She’ll be fine, though.” He tapped Chris’s hand that was resting across his chest. “She’s kind of like you in that way: really nervous before the game, but a beast on the field.”

Chris grinned. “Yeah. So after she told me—don’t tell Ransom or Holster this, but I snuck out of the Haus at one this morning so we could take a walk around the Pond. She was fine after that. Samwell’s really pretty at night.”

“Moonlit walk?”

“I guess you can call it that.” At the sideways look from Dex, Chris added, “Really, it’s just a walk! I didn’t stay the night or anything. That’d be—weird.”

“You guys,” Dex said, “are almost too cute to be real. That’s, like, some Eighties teen movie cliché right there.”

“Then I like Eighties movies clichés,” Chris said. Then, “How are you and Nursey?”

Dex did tense, but it was such a slight thing Chris almost missed it, even with his arms wrapped around his shoulders. _All these years, then_ , Chris thought. Just beating himself, inward and inward, until he couldn’t betray himself.

“We’re good,” Dex said. “This morning he was helping me with that core class I’m taking, did I tell you that?” Chris shook his head. “Well. He was. And you know how Nursey’s kind of an asshole about poetry sometimes, right?”

“Well—he gets passionate,” Chris said.

“Just _slightly_ an asshole,” Dex allowed. “Just when you don’t get things that he finds obvious. But anyway I was arguing with him about Sonnet 18. And really, he’s probably right about the poem being a bold declaration of homoerotic desire to Shakespeare’s lover disguised as metaphysical commentary about the place of poetry or whatever—I actually forgot what my argument was, besides thinking Shakespeare’s this creepy old man who really is way too obsessive about this Fair Youth guy.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. So halfway through, Nursey looked at me and said—and said, ‘You know what, Dex? Think of it this way.’ And he stands up, and he faces me, and he starts reciting the poem from the beginning, just like that. He stands there and he starts reciting, ‘ _Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate…_ ’”

 _And how could I not?_ Dex seemed to plead with Chris. _How could I not?_

They talked like this for much of the rest of the night—in conversations strung out in wide, looping digressions that somehow managed to paint a coherent picture to Chris anyway.

Dex came out to Nursey two days later, and the week after was torturous for Chris to watch, the way every laugh and joke from Dex was perched atop the painful reassurance of _You have nothing to worry from me, my friend; please don’t suspect me_ , and every stretch of silence was filled with Nursey’s wandering eyes tracing out the thoughts _So he is—_ and then _I have a chance—_ followed by _But it doesn’t matter either way, because—_ and ending with _He doesn’t love me_.

 

 

They were hanging out in Boston one weekend, Dex recounting some outrageous story to Nursey a few paces away, when Cait asked him: “They like each other, don’t they?”

The look on her face allowed no tiptoeing around the subject. So he said, “Yeah, I think so.”

Ahead, Nursey all but roared with laughter. Dex looked pleased with himself.

“You haven’t told them?” Cait asked.

“No. I feel like—” Chris shifted his grip on her hand. “I shouldn’t say anything.”

She laced their fingers together. “How come?”

Chris considered this, then told her about David and Meimei.

A gust snuck between the pedestrians and curled around Chris’s cheeks and exposed ankles. Cait snuggled closer to his side, and he adjusted her knitted hat so that it better covered her ears.

“Thanks,” she said, and pressed a kiss against his temple.

Ahead, Dex sneezed, and Nursey was using this moment to taunt Dex into asking for Nursey’s scarf.

“Does that make sense?” Chris asked. “About why I don’t want to say anything?”

“No, I understand. But,” Cait said, tucking her lapels closer to her neck, “don’t you think by saying nothing, they will take it as confirmation that the other person doesn’t return their feelings?”

Chris didn’t have an answer to that.

Nursey and Dex turned back to call them forward; Nursey had found a tidy little café across the street that he wanted to duck into for a while. Cait gave Chris a significant look and slipped out from his side.

“Let’s talk about this later,” she said, pulling him forward. She smiled. “Come on. You owe me for pizza yesterday.”

Chris mulled over Cait’s question for the next couple of days and rewound every significant interaction he had seen between the three of them since the beginning of sophomore year.

Did they think that he—?

Was he really—?

Eventually, he settled on this thought: Even if Dex or Nursey did think they could gauge each other’s interest by talking to Chris, that couldn’t be the sole reason they had yet to confess. He was their best friend, yes, but he wasn’t omnipotent. He knew how people think when they are head over heels for someone else, how every gaze became laced with flirtation, every conversation was code for interest. Dex and Nursey wouldn’t rely on him, if they really—

If they really were serious about each other.

But that wasn’t right either, was it?

The thought troubled him all week, until by the end of it he received a Skype call request from Meimei.

“Hello?” he called, when Meimei’s icon dimmed then blinked into video.

To his surprise, Meimei wasn’t alone in her room.

“Hey, Chris,” David said next to her, lifting a hand.

“Oh,” Chris said. “David! Are you visiting Meimei?”

“Yeah,” he said. “But actually—” He glanced at Meimei.

“There’s something else we wanted to tell you,” Meimei said. “And oh my god, I’m really sorry we kept it a secret for so long! But we wanted to try it out, you know? And see where it goes. And long-distance—or, well, sort of long distance—is such a tricky thing to get right, you know? Who knows what might have happened? I mean, not that anything _would_ , but, like—”

David placed a hand at the nape of Meimei’s neck. “Oy. Breathe.”

“Oops.” Meimei grinned sheepishly at him, then at Chris. “Er, so basically? We’ve been together since October.”

“October 17th,” David corrected, then glanced to the side to blink out his embarrassment.

“Yeah,” Meimei said, looking after him happily. “Yeah.” She then turned to search Chris’s face, anxious. “What are you thinking?”

“Oh my god” was all Chris could say. He laughed. “I’m so happy for you guys. I mean—really? For real this time?”

They both nodded, in tandem, like they did so often in high school. David’s arms stretched around Meimei’s shoulders, and she rested her head on his chest. “For real this time,” David said.

They relayed the whole tale: how they reconnected after summer, how they began visiting each other regularly via the subway in the fall, and how they made it official after Meimei finally finished her midterms—and David finally finished procrastinating on his. They both felt terrible about lying by omission over winter break, but Chris wasn’t mad at them for it. If anything, he felt guilty for having been too worried about hockey then to notice.

When Chris and Cait went jogging the next morning, he told her what had happened between David and Meimei.

“It’s not your fault, you know, what happened at your guys’ prom,” she pointed out between heavy breaths when they crossed Faber. “It’s never been.”

“Yeah,” he said, “I guess.”

“You told them the full truth,” she said, “and they made their own decisions. Now they are together, also partly through you. Besides, they were in high school then. Sometimes people just aren’t ready for each other until they’re a bit older.” They reached the Samwell River. “It’s the same for Dex and Nursey, you know.”

“I don’t want them to get hurt,” Chris finally confessed, “and hate me.”

Cait trotted to a stop by one of the bridges, Chris following. She faced him and placed her hands on his shoulders.

“They’re both really stubborn guys, and they’ve set up an impossible situation for themselves. They’re likely going to get hurt either way. But they won’t hate you.” She slipped her palms down his arms to lace their fingers together. “I’m not saying you should just—tell them outright. Because it _is_ their secret. But give them some guidance. If they ask, don’t lie. And let them choose for themselves.”

 

 

Chris’s immediate reaction to Nursey’s announcement of “We’re going to be Hausmates!” was delight. This was a given. The three of them were first and foremost friends, _best_ friends, and Chris had long awaited the time he could simply walk down the hall to talk about the wonderful thing that happened to him that day and hear the same thing from them, instead of relying on texts and messaging.

His second reaction, when he processed the words “Me and Dex got Lardo’s bids,” was best characterized by the words _Oh shit_.

For his part, Nursey’s response to the roommate arrangement largely consisted of marching to the River Quad, then down to Founder’s, around Founder’s, to the art school, across the econ buildings, up to Faber, and around the murder Stop ’N’ Shop. All the while, Chris listened to Nursey’s elaborate speech on why this new development absolutely did not bother Derek “I’m Chill as _Fuck_ Right Now” Nurse. The explanations could be summarized into four major points:

First, Nursey had one-upped Dex, ha- _ha_ , what about that?

Second, even though Nursey did have a crush on Dex—and just a crush, mind you, happens all the time—it totally wasn’t going to change anything because why would rooming with your crush change anything at all, right? Wouldn’t make sense.

Third, it really was weird how against rooming with Nursey Dex was, he thought they were pretty good friends now, Nursey wasn’t hurt by that or anything—really, he was going to pull _so many pranks_ on Dex that it was basically justified—but actually though, the way Dex acted so devastated was pretty funny—totally funny—as expected of Poindexter, really—

Four, Nursey. Was. Chill.

Dex, when Chris returned to the Haus, was still squatting by the cracks in the floorboard where the coin had rolled in.

“Dude,” Lardo was saying, poking at Dex with a piece of charcoal. “I room you with Nursey all the time for games and you haven’t killed each other yet. This is an overreaction.”

It was probably an underreaction, all things considered. Dex remained unresponsive until Chris returned later to whisper, “Bitty needs your help with the pies,” and even then it was just to lift up his head and say, “I... I can’t,” like the last rasps of a dying man.

 

 

The real damage control began the day after, when Nursey caught Chris after practice for a long talk about Nursey’s feelings on the subject, which ended with repeated insistences that the very feelings he was currently describing to Chris could not be serious. Dex, on the other hand, would not broach the subject voluntarily but somehow managed to talk around Nursey in circles anyway, carried away from whatever topic was at hand by what was really on his mind.

But none of this compared to how they acted around each other:

Complete normalcy.

They shoved themselves into the same dynamic of teasing and jokes, with occasional flare-ups in the underlying tone around the subject of roommating. If they managed to stumble their way into the subject—which was often—Dex would would recall all the appliances he had fixed for the Haus in the past year while Nursey would just shrug and whisper, “The rent is even lower this way, dude.” This would start another round of arguments that were more playacting again than anything.

Jokes flopped, laughs came seconds too late, arguments would sometimes hit too close to home. Not once did they talk about the actual event of _becoming_ roommates in front of Chris. He didn’t know if they had even decided who would get top bunk yet. It was almost as though they couldn’t think about a future of rooming together in any coherent form.

Their interactions were strained, and Chris was caught in the middle as he had been in high school. Yet at the same time, he realized how different Dex and Nursey were from David and Meimei. Dex and Nursey were entirely too protective of each other, and the idea of hurting the other was anathema: each of them was all too ready to catch the outpouring of his own feelings and induct the force of them back in.

Chris saw, with startling clarity, the road ahead:

Years and years of buildup, cycles upon cycles of incidences like this one, through partners and distance, until finally it all piled on too high and tensions turned into avoidance. This, followed by lost contacts and forced reunions, then silence altogether.

It was then Chris understood.

 

 

When Chris stopped letting himself be the roadblock between his two friends, he told Nursey, after another one of Nursey’s rants, “I think you’re angry with yourself because you are in love with Dex. But it’s okay to be in love with him, despite whatever you think you should be. It’s okay.”

He told Dex, when Dex had the faraway look of sadness in his eyes again that brought up Nursey without words, “You shouldn’t go on thinking that you’re not someone who deserves love. Because you do.”

Chris couldn’t deny that it was meddling, because he knew exactly how they would react to the words: the way Nursey paused, stared at him, and couldn’t find a single thing to say in response; the way Dex seemed to have the breath knocked out of his lungs, then tried to laugh it off. But it was something he would say to any friend with the same problems, and maybe denying them that, willfully or not, had been the real meddling after all.

When they both posed to him separately in the span of a week the hypothetical, completely hypothetical, scenario in which they confessed to the other, he asked, “Why not?” When they elaborated on all of the catastrophic consequences that would rain upon their friendship, their team, their classes, and their lives, he asked them, “Do you think he’ll lose you over something like that?”

 

 

They both chose, hilariously, the same moment for their time of confession. When Nursey laid out his plan not half an hour after Dex had proposed the same idea, Chris had to bite his lips to fight a smile.

After the seniors kissed the ice, and many a manly hugs were exchanged between hockey bros in Faber Rink, the team headed to the roof for one last round of stories from Ransom and Holster and one last round of dry remarks from Lardo. Then it was two in the morning, freezing, and only a handful number of people were left. Between the sleepy haze brought in by the pan fire, beer, and Bitty’s pie, Dex and Nursey exchanged some silent signal, and Dex murmured, “Excuse us for a moment.” The two of them ducked behind the stairwell with no one the wiser. Chris waited.

He waited until the last slice of pie was consumed, and Bitty texted his good night to Jack, and the conversation entered a lull that could comfortably stretch into infinity. He waited until Ransom and Holster had fallen asleep on each other under their blankets and stirred up light snores in the silence, and Bitty and Lardo huddled against each other, eyes slowly drifting shut. He waited until the fire burned up all of its coal and muted to ember, then to dust.

Only then did he hear soft footsteps approaching them.

“They’re all asleep.” It was Nursey’s voice.

“Should we wake them?” It was Dex.

“Nah,” said Nursey. “It’s tradition.”

“Tradition,” Dex echoed.

Chris finally spoke up: “You guys okay?” His voice came out softer than he expected: he must be more tired than he thought.

“Yeah,” said Dex. There was a rustle of fabric, and when he spoke again it was closer to Chris’s ear. “Yeah, we—talked, uh, some things out. We can tell you later. You want to go back to campus with us?”

“ ’S fine,” Chris said. “Gonna sleep here.”

“Alright,” said Nursey, sounding a touch amused. There was some scrambling to his left, then a puff of air by his ear was followed by a slight weight over his shoulders. “Stay warm, C.”

“ ’M glad you guys’re fine,” Chris said.

There was a soft chuckle. Then Nursey said, “We’re glad too.”

 

 

Cait somehow managed to secure a booth at Annie’s for the four of them on the last day of school. When Chris arrived at the diner and asked her how she managed this, all she would offer were some vague statements about “volleyball alumni connections.” And, well, he would take that.

Nursey and Dex came in holding hands, and Chris felt—proud, strangely, watching them. The first week they announced their relationship to the rest of the team, Dex had looked twitchy and prepared to flee around the Haus even when Bitty approached him. Nursey had laughed it off, talked about how incongruous two six-feet-two hockey bros would look walking down the street hand-in-hand—an act if Chris every saw one. Now, steadied upon their one-month anniversary, walking hand-in-hand was a thing of second nature for the two of them.

After the four of them were served, Nursey stood to get a salt shaker that had been missing from their table. When he returned, he dipped down to give a distracted kiss on Dex’s cheek, which Dex accidentally received in full on the lips. Nursey leaned back for a moment, ready to apologize, but then Dex laughed and leaned forward again, and Nursey tipped toward Dex too, smiling into the kiss.

“Fine,” Cait declared.

They whipped their heads toward her, shocked, and she smiled proudly. Nursey’s expression was near a pout, and Chris had to fight a chuckle.

“That’s not how it works,” Nursey said, sitting down.

“That’s totally how it works,” Chris told him, as Dex slapped him a dime across the table.

“You two should get used to it,” Cait said, sipping the milkshake she was sharing with Chris. “You’re rooming together next semester after all—with the rest of the team, right?”

Nursey and Dex glanced at each other and looked away, embarrassed. Cait raised her eyebrows.

“Yeah,” Dex finally coughed out. “With the rest of the team.”

Nursey was the first one to break, and he laughed. “God—this reminds me of the freak-out I had mid-semester.”

“About rooming?” Dex asked.

“Yeah,” Nursey said. “I basically dragged C around campus to confess my tortured thoughts about rooming with you when Lardo gave us her dibs. It was—I don’t think I made a lot of sense.” He laughed then raised his water glass to toast Chris. “To Chowder, for his patience through the many rants I forced on him about my crush on Dex over the past year.”

Dex choked on a piece of toast.

“W-what?” he said, coughing. He whirled on Chris, who was finding the floral patterns on the tablecloth geometrically fascinating. “You knew that he—” To Nursey’s curious look, he said, “I told Chowder too. About you.”

Chris had not prepared for this, and he looked to Cait for support. Cait, for her part, mouthed the letters “LOL” at him and patted him on the shoulder.

Finally, Nursey asked, “C?”

Chris turned back to them and sighed. “Yeah,” he said. “Dex told me at the beginning of the semester. Nursey told me in October. But I sort of guessed since—since forever ago.”

Nursey’s cheeks tinged red, but Dex was grinning ear-to-ear.

“You’ve liked me since forever ago?” Dex asked Nursey.

Nursey took a swallow of water, then said, “Yes, Poindexter. Since forever ago.” He looked at Dex and pointed a fork at him accusingly. “You too. You were also madly in love with me since forever ago.”

“Shut up,” Dex grumbled, but he kissed Nursey on the cheek anyway. To Chris, he teased, “You could’ve just told us, you know. I would’ve acted less like an idiot.”

“I don’t know man,” Nursey said, though he still wouldn’t make eye contact with Dex. “I was pretty dignified through it all.”

Cait laughed and curled her fingers around Chris’s. Chris digested the scene before him. They weren’t mad, not at all. The knot in his stomach loosened.

“It wasn’t my place,” Chris said happily, as he dug into the most delicious pan of hash browns in the world. “Besides—you guys got here just fine in the end.”

 

✶

 


End file.
